Live and Local with Fancy Gap and Dante High!

Chapelboro.com

Dante High (Ari Picker) and Fancy Gap (Stuart McLamb and Charles Crossingham) stopped by Live & Local this week, ahead of their show at Cats Cradle this Friday, November 15 – which is also an album-release show (of sorts) for Dante High.

Visit CatsCradle.com for tickets to Friday’s show.

Dante High and Fancy Gap are both fairly new projects: Fancy Gap released its self-titled debut album earlier this year, and while the new Dante High album will be the third, Picker’s only been performing under that name since 2018. But Picker, McLamb, and Crossingham go much further back than that: all three have been acclaimed musicians and producers for well over a decade, and McLamb and Picker actually joined forces back in the 2000s, for a one-off performance of Misfits covers that Picker describes as “the first Dante High show.”

Friday’s show is also Dante High-focused, insofar as it revolves around the new album – but it’s also a spotlight for McLamb and Crossingham, who are still enjoying the acclaim from Fancy Gap’s album release over the summer. Recently Fancy Gap played a benefit show at Red Hat that raised more than a million dollars for western North Carolina hurricane relief; later, they’ll be filming an episode of PBS’s new series “Shaped By Sound” to air next year. (McLamb says the set design features a mechanical bull.)

Visit FancyGap.com.

Meanwhile Picker says he’s still putting the finishing touches on his own new album, so it won’t be available to the general public for about a month – but concertgoers on Friday will get a sneak peek. A couple of singles are already out, though – including “Small Town Midnights,” which builds on a John Mellencamp riff to create a nostalgic, bittersweet (and damn catchy) portrait of teenage life in the 80s and 90s.

“I was just trying to (rip off) Bryan Adams, ‘Summer of ’69,’ those kind of songs,” Picker says. “Thinking about your youth, dreaming about the old days. I like that nostalgia… (and) everything in that song is true. That’s what we did in Chatham County: smoke weed around bonfires and drive our cars into swimming pools. And that’s what that song’s about.”

(Was Picker the one who drove the car into the swimming pool? “I did not do it!” he insists.)

Follow Dante High on Instagram.

Fans may soon be feeling nostalgic for Dante High itself: Picker (now a first-time father) has billed Friday’s show as a “last hurrah,” saying it may be his last performance at the Cradle – at least for the foreseeable future.

“I’m constantly going back and forth,” he says. “I feel like I’m called more and more to just take a break, and I think at some point I just need to listen to that. I don’t know…

“(Being a dad) changes everything. Your responsibilities change, your mindset changes, your time changes… (and) I’ve been doing music for 25-plus years now. I love the David Bowie model, in ‘Ziggy Stardust’ where he quits at the end. I love that. He’s on top of the world and he quits. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I do feel a calling to just hang it up for a while.”

Whatever happens, though, Friday’s show will not be your last chance to see Dante High on stage: Picker says the band is also slated to play at the Acorn Drop in Raleigh on New Year’s Eve. (Fancy Gap’s next show is coming up even sooner: they’ll be in Greensboro on November 30.)

Charles Crossingham, Stuart McLamb, and Ari Picker stopped by Live & Local this week to chat about Friday’s show and play three tracks: Dante High’s “Saturday Night” and “Small Town Midnights,” and Fancy Gap’s “40,000 Miles.” Listen:

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